It is known that in heart-surgery practice some devices for the mechanical assistance of the heart are used, commonly indicated as “ventricular assist devices (V.A.D.)” or “total artificial hearts (T.A.H.)”.
These are essentially devices adapted to mechanically pump blood to produce pulsing or continuous blood flows.
Such devices are employed to solve acute reversible heart failure clinical cases (as infarct or myocarditis) or are used to support the circulatory function while waiting for a heart transplant.
There have been for years several both left and right ventricular assist devices or biventricular assist devices (T.A.H); some of them are commercially available, others have been developed only at an experimental stage.
In most cases, the currently existing devices exhibit some difficulties to be accommodated inside the chest, because of problems both with size and weight.
Other drawbacks that can be found therein are caused by their inner configurations and their pumping modes, which may induce haemolysis or blood clot formation.
Some solutions currently use a balloon (ventricular sac) or a single membrane as a blood contacting flexible element. These devices, as their inherent feature, do not allow blood circulation in the pump, thus avoiding the above mentioned problems. Another negative aspect of these currently available solutions is represented by the weight and size of the driving units associated with the pumping device, which render the portability, namely the easy transport by the patient, essentially non-existent.